Enterprise server systems as well as other electronic systems have seen an increased focus on energy efficiency and energy proportional computing in the last several years. Managing memory power is critical to the overall efficiency in these platforms given capacity and bandwidth requirements of server processors and workloads.
As the number of processing cores continues to increase and integration of throughput computing and input/output (I/O) capabilities accelerates this trend is expected to intensify making memory power management a key element of platform energy efficiency. One approach is to focus on reducing idle memory power through aggressive support of power-down and self-refresh states leading to significant improvements in memory power efficiency.